Customer Reviews

The Prospect of Immortality

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the clarion call for cryonics in its pre-natal stage. This was the first widely read book on the subject and as such is by default the genesis of the cryonics cannon.

Any serious student of cryonics needs this book. It is not nearly as readable or as "slick" as other modern books on the subject , as it was written at a time before there we any signposts to go by in this field.

I rate this book 5 stars for its significance rather than its "readability". In terms of being a cryonics primer, this is not the book you want, all you need for a primer is 2-3 hours on the alcor.com website. (the most prominent of the cryopreservation firms)

The fact that this book does not have more visibility than it does is a crime.

This book, which I read when it was first published in 1964, a month before I graduated from college, literally changed my life, as it has the lives of thousands of people since. This is the seminal work of the immortalist movement. Indeed many leading cryobiologists and scientists in other fields today were inspired to become scientists by this book. The additional contributions by R. Michael Perry, also the author of a seminal work - FOREVER FOR ALL, and by Charles Tandy, a life long student of Immortalism, only add to the value of this updated edition.

Peter H. Christiansen M.Div.
Former Senior Minister
First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles
Mt Diablo (Walnut Creek CA) Unitarian Universalist Church

Needless to say, transhumanism and cryonics are still considered "out there" by the vast majority of humankind. "How can you possibly bring back a person's consciousness?" "God never intended people to live past 'three score and ten.'" "Won't this make the population explosion even worse?" "Who wants to come back all old and wrinkled." "I'll be happy to leave this veil of tears."

One hears all manner of rationalizations and just plain misconceptions to accept the status quo. More than 40 years ago (!!) Dr. Ettinger made, still to this day, the most eloquent and passionate appeal to assure a practically immortal future for every commoner who wants one.

...

For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie
reviews, please visit my site [...]

Brian Wright
Copyright 2007

Robert Ettinger is way ahead of his time. His rational and logical look at life and death has certainly opened eyes and perhaps saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

But perhaps not on our book shelves or ebook readers in the 21st Century.

My, how time flies. I met Mr. Ettinger once in 1994, yet I don't claim I knew him by any means, other than through his writings. But I have followed the cryonics movement since the 1970's, after I read Ettinger's later book Man into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution -- And How To Be Part of It in 1974. The world has moved on since then, and I can see how a lot of the cryonics literature from 1964 through the 1990's has gone out of date and sounds increasingly paleo-futuristic, in the jet packs, moon colonies and flying cars sense, Ettinger's writings included. The Prospect of Immortality, originally published in 1964, now falls into the "of historical interest" category as an introduction to the idea of cryonics (a word Ettinger didn't use; a Scientologist coined it a couple years later), and the cryonics project needs some better written and more current expositions of our project to make it accessible to the generation which grew up admiring Steve Jobs instead of, say, Wernher Von Braun.